@Riggerman
The intention was to get oil, but it didn’t pan out as well as the Bush administration hoped. The continuing violence in the region wasn’t planned for, and the whole thing is now a giant clusterfuck, but the hope of access to oil was the primary motivator.
“Bush’s Cabinet agreed in April 2001 that ‘Iraq remains a destabilising influence to the flow of oil to international markets from the Middle East’ and because this is an unacceptable risk to the US ‘military intervention’ is necessary.”
In the December 13, 2002, briefing, deputy secretary of defense Paul Wolfowitz said that the ”‘the cost of the occupation, the cost for the military administration and providing for a provisional [civilian] administration, all of that would come out of Iraqi oil.’”
In September 2008, oil giant Shell become the first western oil company to win significant access to the energy sector in Iraq since the 1970s, in a $4bn deal, which angered the industry’s critics who argued that there had been no competitive tendering. Shell signed an agreement with the OIl Ministry to form a joint venture with the South Gas Company, in Basra to process and market natural gas extracted on 19,000 sq km (7,300 sq miles) of land.
As for tactics, Iraq borders on all the other Middle Eastern countries, it is the only one with an inland fresh water source (the Tigris and the Euphrates) and is within easy missile striking distance from Israel and the former Soviet Union.